New Delhi: As many as 762,072 pieces of fake notes were detected in the banking system last fiscal, a 20.4% increase over the previous year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said Wednesday. In 2015-16, 632,000 fake currency notes had been detected, RBI said in its annual report for 2016-17.

It also said that barring Rs 100, the detection of fake notes increased across denominations—notably, Rs 500 and Rs 1000—during the last fiscal.

In the annual report, RBI said that coincident with the announcement of the withdrawal of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes due to demonetisation, it launched a nationwide exercise to estimate the density of fake Indian currency notes (FICNs) detected during the counting and verification of notes.

“The result showed the rate of FICN detected per million pieces of notes processed at CC (currency chest) level at 7.1 pieces for Rs 500 denomination and 19.1 pieces for Rs 1000 denomination, which were higher than the rate of detection at the Reserve Bank,” the annual report said.

At the RBI’s currency verification and processing system, in 2015-16, there were 2.4 pieces of FICNs of Rs 500 denomination and 5.8 pieces of Rs 1000 for every million pieces notes processed. These figures rose to 5.5 and 12.4 pieces, respectively, during the post-demonetisation period.